Mining for love in a Dystopian Russian future

Olga Slavnikova’s “2017, ” set on the anniversary of the revolution, is so packed full of ideas and images it threatens to explode.

In
the mythical Riphean
Mountains, gem
prospectors, called rock hounds, search for precious stones. On the streets of
a Russian city, romance unfolds against the backdrop of the centenary of the
1917 revolution—seemingly a call to repeated violence. Olga Slavnikova weaves
these parallel plots and settings together in “2017,” an ambitious,
postmodern contribution to a revered literary tradition. Slavnikova’s strange,
genre-defying novel, winner of the 2006 Russian Booker Prize, finally made it
into English in Marian Schwartz’s luminous translation.

There
is a great heritage of Russian Sci Fi, most of it decidedly dystopian. George
Orwell borrowed shamelessly from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s 1921 “We”. Several recent
novels have set their action a few years in the future to create a satirical
alternative present: Tatyana Tolstaya’s “Slynx” and Dmitry Glukhovsky’s “Metro 2033” use post-apocalyptic
scenarios.

Slavnikova
flirts with the sci-fi genre. She winks at rejuvenating nanotechnologies,
flashes a few holographic toys and flutters some comic predictions: a female
American president with a multiracial rainbow of adopted kids; a fashionable
nightclub with an “erotic striptease based on Dostoevsky’s plots.” A more
serious prognosis is found in ecological catastrophe, springing from human
greed and carelessness, which is poisoning the mineral-rich Ripheans
(reminiscent of Slavnikova’s native Urals).

The
anniversary of the revolution reinforces the idea of a recurring national
destiny. Many 19th-century Russian artists embraced a rebirth of
folk art and Slavic heroes. For Slavnikova, this stylistic nostalgia created an
“historical dreaminess in their weak and impressionable heirs.” History becomes
a virus and then an epidemic, spreading finally to Moscow where the toppled monument to
murderous security chief, Felix Dzerzhinsky, is resurrected. The novel coasts
close to reality here since Moscow’s
former mayor suggested just such a reinstatement in 2002.

Slavnikova
imagines a fake, but bloody civil war, as inevitable as it is inauthentic. The
striving for authenticity, rejecting the superficial sparkle of wealth and the
“culture of copies,” is a keynote of the novel. This is not an exclusively
Russian problem, but part of a “terrible, global passivity.”

The
protagonist, a gem-cutter called Krylov, relishes the transparency of quartz;
his polishing is an attempt to reveal what he sees inside. Despite this
background in a lovingly-depicted trade, Krylov’s aimlessness nudges him
towards the ranks of Russian literature’s famous superfluous men. In fact his
ex-wife, Tamara, declares that most of the human race is now superfluous,
irrelevant ‘to the economy and progress.’ Tamara runs a funeral business that
profits from reinventing ‘the worst kitsch Russian commerce had to offer’; she
even offers her clients a lottery where they can win a Caribbean
holiday.

The
women in Krylov’s life are disappointingly allegorical. Tamara is fleshy and
glamorous, worldly and cynical, while Krylov’s lover, the mysterious Tanya, is
slim and spiritual. Krylov and Tanya’s poignant and fragile relationship
recalls that of Anna and Dmitry in Chekhov’s “Lady with a little Dog” mixed up
– in this case - with a spy thriller. Tanya is a frustratingly elusive
character, identified with the legendary “Stone Maiden,” one of the rock
spirits who occasionally threaten to lead the novel veering off into the
thickets of magic realism.

Deep-rooted
paganism and folklore are just two of the facets of Russian culture the book
begins to explore. “2017”
is packed so full of ideas and images it sometimes threatens to explode under
the pressure. Its strength is in its linguistic subtlety and ingenuity. The
opening chapters are dauntingly long-winded, but – like the Riphean Mountains
– these dense hills of text hide invaluable riches.